Hey guys, thanks for reading this! I know it's a bit long, but I think I said what I needed to say, and I'm applying for the writing program, so I'm allowed to write a bit. The essay itself had no limit . Do you guys think I should trim it down, regardless? How? And how is everything else about it? I wrote it all in one sitting and think it might not be very good. Anyway, thanks!
The prompt was: Why do you want to attend Pratt and what do you hope to accomplish from your education?
Thanks again!
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I want to enroll in the Pratt Institute Writing Program because I am a writer.
There, that intimidating, horrible word so synonymous with "pretentious" and "slacker" has been spoken. Now that it is out there, and quite bluntly, I might as well continue on the weary path of elaborating what I mean. I shall now begin, in my own subtle way, to define "writer."
Hah! I might as well explain the meaning of life!
Also, in a slightly easier (if a little more personal and uncomfortable) and altogether less subtle manner, I will attempt to define myself. I hope by the end of this, you haven't turned against me entirely. In fact, I harbor a secret (pretentious!) desire that you'll have found something worthwhile enough in me to allow me entry into that impregnable castle of Pratt. One can dream, can't he?
Anyway, I suppose if I were to cut the fat around the question of why I want to go to Pratt, I would be left with the stub of a question about who I am. I suppose, then, that is the question I will attempt to tackle first. Well then, what better place to begin than with what I am, and only to later on proceed to who?
So, what am I? I am a writer.
We can then elaborate the subject of writer with another question; one that strays further from the core of the question in continuity, but nonetheless straddles it in purpose. The next question, asked at the answer to the first question is this:
Why?
And that is the million dollar question, isn't it? Why am I a writer? Why is anybody a writer? Two hefty questions, to be sure. Those kinds of questions are most often answered by people pretentious enough to call themselves writers. Since the first line of this essay, I have put myself into this group, so now I believe it is my responsibility as a member of that group to try my hands at answering these questions. Hell, while I'm at it, if there's time for it at the end, I might as well try to explain the meaning of life.
I believe that writers write for the exclusive purpose that there simply isn't anything else they could do, even if they wanted to. At birth and in the course of that terrifying, magic thing called growing up, some people are shot through the heart with a spark of something that makes them writers. Plain and simple, they become infected with a sort of disease that makes them sick if they don't put down words on paper.
Don't get me wrong. This isn't to say that everybody cursed with that spark is blessed with that magically elusive thing called talent or that wonderfully faraway, barely-obtainable thing called skill. No, those are different things entirely. No, I'm speaking only of that spark of intuition that lets a person know that they were simply born to write, and there wasn't any if, and, or but about it.
To be a writer in a position where one cannot write is a most horrible condition indeed. Just as Albert Camus understood that the job of a writer was to keep the world from destroying itself, in the hidden corners of the mind of a writer, we all understand that we would ourselves be destroyed without our own writing. Writing for us is a condition whose very reward is its greatest punishment. To be a writer is to live a constant paradox, in which the fruits of labor are simultaneously pride-worthy and vastly humbling. Being a writer, quite simply, is hard!
Writing requires you to lose yourself in the moment of creation. Like any art, it's about shoving a grasping hand down the throat of your consciousness and yanking things about until you've grasped upon the right pieces of the human condition, then letting the pieces fall upon a page in the guise of words and the twisted face of fiction.
Writing is about showing yourself naked and vulnerable as you were the day you were born to the world. It's about stripping yourself of the shrouds of daily life and revealing exactly the kind of human being you are. If you've done anything right at all, you'll have shown something about humanity as a whole. That, above all else, is what being a writer is about.
Autobiographical pauses are annoying, but I'm afraid I'll have to stray into one at the moment. Forgive me in advance, would you?
I was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. A place I don't remember, and lived in the seaside town of Gloucester until I was one year old. Of this place from my memory I have, I believe, one memoryïalthough it may have been invented. I remember sitting on a hill, and I believe I was outside the house. My brother was there, and my sister. We were playing some kind of game. More likely, they were playing and I sat, little more than a baby, watching. I can't remember if any adults were there. There probably were, but you can never know for sure. The hill felt impossibly steep thenïor maybe does only in my imaginationïand at its side there was a rocky cliff that seemed to plunge into infinity. Whether it was real or my imagination, there was a white fence that blocked me off from the cliff. At the time, I felt invincible on my side of the fence, separated by those whitewashed wooden planks from that bottomless nether.
At the time, I felt like the picket fence was an impenetrable wall of Jerusalem, and that even if I wanted to, I couldn't get to that pit. And nothing from the pit, no foul, writhing creature of the world below could get at me. I was safe, I was secure.
Then, like everybody else, I grew up. The wall became smaller and smaller, and eventually the gates of Jerusalem became the gates of Jericho, and a mighty horn sounded. They fell and crumpled, and I was left to face the bottomless pit on my own. Like any writer, I had no other choice but to close my eyes, welling with curiosity, and jump headfirst into that deep, dark, unknown. What did I find in the pit, once I plunged in, when I opened my eyes?
I couldn't tell you, not yet. I am still plunging. My eyes are still closed.
Anyway, to continue this autobiographical pause, I suppose I'd better tell you about my parents. My dad's from Virginia. He used to be a commercial fisherman, and he's the son of a commercial fisherman who was the son of a commercial fisherman who was the son of a commercial fisherman. My mother is a Portuguese immigrant who grew up in Socialist Mozambique. Neither finished high school. Neither are particularly interested in politics. My mother writes vast volumes of unpublished poetry in the English language. She hardly ever talks about Mozambique, where she grew up, and never about the Azores, where she was born. My father barely ever talks about Fishing anymore, and never talks about Virginia. When you grow up, time sort of abandons you, I guess.
When somebody starts writing, it's a little bit like plunging into a pit you've known existed your entire life, but have never been able to see or explore. I started writing seriously sometime in the fourth or fifth grade. By that time I lived in Maine, and had only one memory from anywhere else.
The pen took to my hand easy enough after some initial resistance in the earliest grades. Writing before then had been a chore. Mastery of the pen as a tool had been difficult. When the work evolved beyond the physical controlling of a pen and into the hard-to-grasp manipulation of language, the pen warmed in my hand and the words started burning across the page. The words came easily, I suppose I had a glint somewhere within me of something which might be called talent, that elusive, painful thing.
And then, as I wrote, I found that spark of something within my heart I hadn't even known existedïthat twisting, hurting condition of being a writerïsubside a little, and the pain faded to momentary pleasantness that lasted through eighth grade. That tormenting, mysterious, frightening monster of High School loomed on me, and as that time passed, I found that writing occasional short stories for English class was suddenly lacking in suppressing that spark in my heart.
So, as all my friends stopped becoming major-league baseball players and astronauts and rock stars and started becoming nurses and cooks, and teachers, I stopped being a child and started being a writer. The change was gradual, and I wasn't even sure it had happened until it was all done with. When I was sure of the fact, however, it struck me all at once, and it was weird to feel the least.
It was a little like I imagine finding out you're adopted would be. A little like finding out where your bacon and sausage came from, and how it got where it is. I am a vegetarian. It was a little bit like finding out your grandfather would not be coming home from the hospital as you sat watching TV, as I found out. I didn't believe it, at first. I thought somebody had to be kidding. In the case of my grandfather not coming homeïmy father. In the case of me being a writerïGod. I thought it couldn't be true, like it was a vastly unnatural thing to have happened.
A writer, really? Who on Earth wants to be a writer? Why not something practical, like a lawyer or a doctor? At least those dreams were reachable with hard work. Or if I had to live a fantasy, why not a more glamorous one, like a rock star or a famous actor? The job of writer was somewhere far from both practical and glamorous. Vastly hard to attain, and even when you peak at the level of celebrity as a writer, you're still widely unrecognized. If a name like John Steinbeck could cross the country completely unrecognized, what did a name like Nicholas Tart ever hope to get from the childish delirium of wanting to be a writer?
I guess I tried to resist it, for a while. Tried to resist that compulsion to write and write. But it was irresistible, like any drug, and after a while I fell to the temptation of will. I started to write again, novels, this time. A few of them in particular. Countless short stories. Essays. Words started heaping on words and before I knew it, I had assembled in my mind entire universes full of characters and places and events and all of it, in some inexplicable way, was linked totally and completely to me. I had poured myself into those characters and places, and rereading my fiction I can see the glittering hint of my green eyes poking through from the other side of the page.
I suppose, I realized sometime in the last couple of years that a writer was what I am, a writer was what I had been, and a writer was the only thing I could ever be. The jobs practicality in the universe had to offer me were all utterly impractical, after all. Being a writer was right, was good, and everything else was a fantasy. Lawyer? Politician? Engineer? Fantasies. Journalist? Maybe. That job would certainly fit in a pinch, but it wasn't quite right. There was only one shape of hole in which I could fit, and the shape of that hole was the glimmering, frightful word; writer.
Ending my slightly prolonged autobiographical bit, I return to the facts at hand. I am a writer who happens to be a senior in high school. I have mentioned before that I believe, deep down, I have a faint glimmer of something which could be considered talent. I believe, also, that in a level of persistence I have gained a diminutive scrap of something which could be considered skill. These two together, with the spark in my heartïmake me a writer who simply cannot give up writing.
Which returns me to the almighty grail of education. That impenetrable castle of Pratt Institute is, by all standards, an enticing, semi-magical place for any aspiring writer. The Writing Program is one of the most attractive programs in the country, and I hope I am not going out of my way by saying that it is by a comfortable mile my number one choice on post high school education.
Another of those frustrating pauses for autobiography. (you must get sick of these, reading essays so much!) I'll try to keep it short. A sentence of four words, perhaps, followed by an elaboration and an anecdote shall do. Here goes.
I am highly independent. I say that in the truest sense of the key word. My parents have had a nearly negligible influence in my development. My saying this does not place a level of misgiving on their raising of me, it's simply an assertion of fact that I was left mostly to decide on things based on their merits with no predispositions, and in such developed a natural ability to essentially care for myself from a very young age. It isn't good, bad, or indifferent. It's just fact.
How far back does that independence go? Was I really alone, with my three-year-old sister and five-year-old brother on top of that hill in Gloucester, Massachusetts? Could it have really been us and the cliff, with only the cold fence of Jerusalem protecting us from its enticing, steep slope to nothingness? Logically, I would assume not, but I suppose anything is possible. It doesn't really matter, right now.
What does matter, is that the sense of independence was built in my since I was a child. Perhaps since before I could remember. Take, for example, my affinity and involvement with social politics.
My parents are both apolitical. The Grateful Dead meant more to them than Jimmy Carter ever did. Bob Dylan was their Ronald Reagan. In terms of community involvement they are grossly lacking, and neither had ever voted as far as I know, save for the 2008 election of which I had them registered. My father is a moderately poor-informed disenfranchised political dissident and pseudo anarchist. He testifies to not voting because "everybody he ever supported, lost" and is a less-government better-government kind of guy who testifies to the policies of neither political party. A true independent to the core, he goes further than not identifying along party lines by actively disassociating himself from both parties. Politics, to him, was a game, and one he never played.
My mother was equally disenfranchised with all corners of the American political spectrum, and along with my father made no differentials with the ideological control of the United States government in terms of any policy. The Government, rather than The Republicans, sent us to war, and The Government, rather than The Democrats was putting an end to it. She is more disassociated than disenfranchised, and only makes occasional, unexpected, and especially short commentaries over government in the United States versus Mozambique; of American Democracy versus African Socialism. Among these short, remarkably unemotional comments, some gems such as having to "wait in line four hours for a bar of soap" and finding remarkable "walking into a store in America and seeing the shelves piled with things to buy. More things than you'd ever need."
My grandmother offers infrequent mentions to Jack Kennedy and growing up with FDR, whom her family always opposed. My grandfather, a fisherman and self-taught lawyer with two fingers on his right hand, for the time he was alive, was disassociated with politics and interested only in law for the purpose of self-betterment. He saw the government as something to oppose when it was trying to grab at his fair share, and was a fierce independent conservative who never voted or supported candidates or issues one way or the other.
So, in lack of opinions from those around me, I was forced to find my own way. I learned. I studied. I read and debated Karl Marx as often as I did Adam Smith. I let myself flood with information and bumble blindly through the darkness of facts until I came across sense of political belonging and ideology. Eventually, I found myself as a (oh god, this word!) liberal with a particular interest in social liberation and empowerment. I found myself logging hour after hour, week after week with the Maine Democratic Party and fighting for the causes and candidates I believed in. I registered my parents and grandmother to vote. I saw that they got to the polls.
Anyway, I tell that story to get to the point of my own independence, and how it is matched almost perfectly by the motivation-driven Writing Program of Pratt Institute. I am a writer, yes. I am motivated when it comes to learning, yes. The Pratt Writing program turns the poles of talent and skill until they have been refined into the great spear of writing, yes.
Why then, do I want to go to Pratt? For the same reason I am a writer.
Because it simply couldn't be any other way.
